flip flops, anyone? a market stall in one of my haunts near Chun-ge-Chun

LINT

Yes, this represents a new, all-time low in the ephemeral and irrelevant world of blogging- posting a picture of your sock lint.

You see, this lint has come to symbolize my life. Let's just back up for a minute and reflect on where lint comes from:

Lint comes from your skin rubbing your clothing, or your shoes rubbing your socks, like my Doc Martens did to my socks. In case you don't wear 'Docs', the leather uppers are stiff and cardboard-y, so from the action of my heel slapping, tiny, individual fibers are pulled away from the warp and woof and they fall to the bottom of the shoe, where they join other fibers and are matted by the hammer of my heel into lint.

Although you could look at my overpriced Docs as little lint factories, pounding out their products across my foot-miles, another way to see lint is to consider what the bhuddists like to call the Precept of Impermanence - all things must pass, all beings are mortal, even rocks give way to time, etc. To put it simply, lint is clothes death.

As I rushed around on this Friday, the last day of the semester, all the final tests safely behind me, I was determined to get out of this country for the 10 days between now and the next class of Summer Session. I had it all worked out; I would pop over on the boat, getting my visa enroute - or then I had option B, pop over to Bangkok with the stub-end of a ticket I returned to Korea on, essentially costing me nothing.

So I'm rushing around, making plans, breaking plans, forming new plans, formulating ideas, checking the weather, verifying prices, and all the while busily making lint (see picture above). And as it turns out, Sock Lint is all I have to show for all my rushing around; once again, there are no tickets available out of Gilligan's Island-Korea; no affordable destinations (other than Thailand, which sort of bores me now) and no visa possible from the Chinese Embassy in reasonable time (I love the Chinese government and their impossible, thieving, murdering ways, because it gives me something to hate more than my own government)

The travel agent just called. Guy says they can put the fix in for me at the embassy so I can hop tonights boat (the next one is in four days) to Beijing if I want. They ask for 300,000 won (about 300 dollars).

"Is that including round-trip boat fare?" sez I
"No" sez they
"What! 300 for a freakin' visa? It was supposed to be a shopping trip, just there and back in a week" shkreamed I

I guess I'll be here, then. The plus side is I can start blogging again; in China this would have been impossible, as most blogging sites are blocked by the Chinese gov'ment. (gotta love'em, right?)

I'll dish up some more lint later on.

Homage to Lewis Caroll or O Henry? Definately not the most appetizing name for a food establishment -what's all that Business School nonsense about the importance of Branding?

Old paths revisited

I've been off the writing for quite some time, and although I can use the excuse that I have been busy moving into a HUGE palace of a place, cleaning it, planning a housewarming party, catching an unidentified skin disease, healing the same, replanning the housewarming party, and re-cleaning the house again, all 70 square meters of which had somehow managed to gather a huge amount of dust - in fact, if the dust has the right pH level, I can save it up for my roof farm later in the summer....

I want to describe two things; the amazing writing of a popular blog I just discovered, actually a constellation of related blogsites called Festering Ass - so cleverly and realistically written that it blows everything else out of the water. The writing style owes much to the late Bukowski, not only in the imaginative treatment, but also in the gritty nature of the subject material. It is not quite as unpleasant as the parent website domain name would have you think, but for you guys, I'd recommend Tucker Max or Hoo-Ah, whereas women may find a sympathetic node at SlowChildren-AtPlay.

I spent most of this weekend cleaning up for and cleaning up after (no more phrasal verbs please , English Teacher!) my house party, and the rest of my time feasting on Slow Children and Tucker Max. I can't remember having cackled at writing on the Internet in some time.

It even inspired me to dust off my keyboard and make another stab at narrative, and at describing my less-than-drab existence in flashier prose. Tucker Max, for example, has a gift for dialogue - but the man takes no chances, carries around a small voice recorder even while getting shit-faced. That certainly is the kind of dedication (and brazenness) that I need to get my act together.

So in that spirit, I've decided to dig up some of my oldest blogrolls from my times in Beijing, to let you, dear reader, decide whether Korea and my cushy existence here have ruined my prose style or made it slightly better. Here's a sample:


Thursday, 24 June 2004

cat follies
Yuen Lao Shi is the landlord of our courtyard house (in Chinese, four corners house), or is related to the owner of our house, and he lives in the first half of the courtyard, separated from our little foreign enclave by a round Chinese arch/doorway.
He is quite the entertaining sort, by that I mean we have come to love his unique blend of Chinese expressions "Fei Shang Hao! Fei Shang Hao!" and English expressions (he loves to trot out an idiom he's been studying recently), his entertaining way of suddenly bursting into song like some sort of South American Latin romanticentric, and his extreme, often painful love of animal and plant life of every kind.
The pride of his menagerie currently seems to be the cat family he has nurtured from the rooftops to the courtyard floor. There appears to be a floating population in this hutong of anywhere from 2 to a couple dozen cats, depending on whether you count tails or midnight moanings. As the last metaphor implies, the Cat Family is busily reproducing itself into our little ecosystem.
The most recent litter was about two weeks ago, just four days before I got to China. The mother cat apparently had chosen the birth spot to be in our Television Lounge room, in a pile of comforters used by our Weekend visitor Maurice. Apparently she didn't like the cardboard box that Yuan Lao Shi had rigged up for her with blankets and pillows. She scratched the door all night and was apparently all but unapproachable.
Yesterday I came home to find Yuan Lao Shi in a bit of a state. The mother cat had one of the babies in her mouth, and was going around the courtyard in a highly agitated state. According to him, she wanted to move them to a new nest, and was looking for a place.
The problem was, she had already hidden two of the kittens and we didn't know where...they were too small for us to hear our cries, so there was nothing for us to do except watch and follow the mother to find out where they were.
She headed straight for our roommate Joel's room. Joel sleeps on a platform elevated two meters above the floor, accessed by a spindly ladder. The mama cat kept jumping from floor to bookshelf, bookshelf to bed platform, each time an entire meter, wiyh a kitten in her mouth. Then she prowled the parameter of the mosquito net, looking for a way into the bed and cushions.
She did this several times, and finally she gave up. We searched the bed but found no babies. Just in case, I left the mosquito net open and tried to let her go in, in case she had actually hidden some babies where we hadn't looked. But she didn't come back.
Normally I'm not involved in the lives of cats....but this one certainly has even me guessing.

To be continued....The House Party and the Salsa Nazis...

This is basically how I picture my dream retirement scenario. I'm not talking about staring at my hairy, knobby legs, but rather the whole tropical dream thing, the hammock being the archetypical symbol of the same.

One might mistake this picture for the inside of a cheap hotel room in Cuba, instead of Luang Prabang.

Oh Mother earth Nipple pointed at the Mouth of the Sky!

Fruit or vegetable? I can't even remember now; but I'm pretty sure that this is in Laos; the newspaper background is laotian....

A lovely Tom Sawyer Style Waterin' Hole, complete with friendly tree...

Another picture for scale....

A WIZARD OF A LIZARD - A rather large iguana-esque creature (the head is the size of a small pumpkin) who is one of the local celebrities in front of a shop where I drank beer, across the street from the immigration office in Vientiane. A man there with a dirty polo shirt and a whole lot of beer inside him struck up a conversation with me; he had come back from America hoping to see this animal, which has been there for many years and through many regimes...a wise old survivor of man's follies...

The man turned out to be more enigmatic than the herpetezoid, however, when he told me that his former job in Laos was working for the CIA, that he was now a rich man living in Walnut Creek, California. (wouldn't it be dangerous to come back here if that were the case?)

I told him I had an auntie living there - but somehow our two exchanges seemed mismatched, like one of those English textbook exercises where you are supposed to recognize that "Thank you, I'm fine" is not the right answer to "Where are you from?"

The man continued to broadcast the CIA story to any and all who passed on the street, and I, feeling the crosshairs coming a little too close for comfort, finished my beer discreetly, and with a nod to the lizard, slunk on down the street to the market to search for more gooey bee larvae.

We had a yellow sand warning yesterday; when I looked out at the city from the top of our office building, maybe 50 meters above it all, all I could see was nothing. Nothing but yellow fog, that is. It looked sort of like the shop floor of a yellow-car-painting company, or like San Francisco looks if you are wearing yellow sunglasses. Of course my nose, eyes, and face knew something was going on - there was an impalpable suffocation in the air, an unbreathability that most people can only understand after sitting in a smoky bar for a few hours - this stuff is killing us, I'm telling you.

Yellow sand, in case you weren't aware of the phenomenon, is gunk blown off of the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts of central and western China, which becomes airborne in the higher reaches of the atmosphere, before precipitating in Korea, Japan, and sometimes California. Hardly sand, most of the particles are colloidal, meaning that they are smaller than cigarette smoke particles and have a certain ability to actually dissolve partially in the air. (known as a colloidal suspension - this is what milk is ).

There is also evidence that it cools the earth, mitigating the recent global warming trend, so it looks like we are stuck with a necessary evil.

A lot of people wore masks yesterday, and I dutifully wore my fancy microfiber model (although I have a really fancy pancy carbon filter from England, but it's too small for my face and doesn't let enough air through) and when I came home I still felt as though a lot of gunk had gone into my nose. So when I blew it out, all I got is what you see above. Nothing. I suppose that's great news, but then again i remembered that it comes in the form of microcolloidal particles - so even things invisible to the naked eye, like the influenza virus, could be in there (the tv news reported finding influenza in the yellow dust, which would explain the rash of stomach complaints around this time)

When I lived in China I heard some kind of story about the 'yellow sand phenomenon' (called red sand in Chinese) that the government had embarked on one of their legendary, epic, Cecil-B.-Demille-type-employment projects, planting hundreds of thousands of trees in the Gobi in an attempt to reduce the yellow sand phenomenon (Beijing suffers terribly; most of the particles that precipitate there are of the honking big variety, causing even greater respiratory distress).

Naturally they had forgotten to do their homework, and planted some sort of fast-growing deciduous species that all flowered and released pollen at the same time - causing such a rash of allergies in the capital that they had to embark on another Cecil-B.-Demille-project to cut them all down again.

Of course this smacks of urban legend, since I don't have the primary source for this, and its the sort of nonsensical story you'd expect to come from the Sleeping Red Giant....

The laotian flag flies from the canoe we took an hour up the Pak Kading - hardly the heart of darkness, but refreshing and wonderful all the same...

handy little garbage can on the railing of a tuk-tuk (modified motorcycle engine with three wheels and tiny seats in the back for passengers)

Laotian herbs abound in the marketplace - I've always equated so-called 'civilization' with the extent to which the herbal folklorico-pharmacopia has been lost to the big pharmaceutical corporations - in Burma, though there are also plenty of extant herbal remedies, there also seems to be a flood of cheap penicillin from India...

the road leading out to the caves - as dusk falls and as thousands of bats pour out of the limestone-cave riddled karst mountains...

A night of Raving - Stark Raving People, that is

Last night was another of those typical nights in Korea.

The Business night-out, the kind you hurry home to dress up for, you abbreviate your swimming session for, the kind you stuff a quick chicken-soup-to-soak-up-the-alcohol-later for...

I was particularly NOT looking forward to this one, because despite my reason for attending being a chance to get a paying writing gig for the first time in a long spell, I just didn't feel it was worth the price of admission: the night out would be with two chain smokers, who seemed to only like talking about different single-malt scotches. (don't get me wrong, I don't mind the occasional sm scotch, but why the hell sit around and talk about them if you aren't drinking them?)

I get to the bar a little late, after a genius taxi driver who seemed to think he would become a millionaire by creeping along slowly and taking the most congested route possible, and walked in, and to my horror was seated between the two chain smokers.

To my relief they had already smoked themselves out, but to make matters a little complicated, one of them, the Korean professor, was already drunk and starting to make a fool of himself...introducing the bar maids as his 'lovely friends' who hadn't yet had their patience worn down by the man.

This was made up for by the delightful discovery of a NORTH KOREAN BEER on the menu - and even more surprising, it tasted great! What the heck? I guess Kim Jong Il's comeuppance of the South finally came through suds....well, I sort of doubt the plebes up north get to drink much of it - like the poor miserable Cubans who have to watch the tourists drink their beer that they can hardly afford, costing like a twentieth of their monthly salary...

Later we ended up at a Sam-Gyup-Sal (thick bacon slab place) restaurant nearby, more soju (sweet potato vodka) and madness, and we ended up at the Canadian professor's house drinking the fabled Ardbec single-malt. Of course, it had gone from a 20 year to a 12 year to a 10 year just in the space of an hour ( I guess people shouldn't be expected to remember how old their alcohol is)...

The stuff had been advertised as 'peaty-tasting' - now that just sounded like nonsense to me - regardless of whether peat had been used in its manufacture, peat is still just glorified mud to me. I swigged the stuff and immediately was hit by a strong smoky....peat flavor....don't ask me how the heck I should know what peat tastes like - I haven't smelled it burning in over 20 years, and I don't think I put any in my mouth then...but it wasn't a bad combination for a whisky.

Unfortunately after several glasses I was left with a distinct liniment-like taste in my mouth. After a few more glasses I think I somehow materialized in my room and it was morning again.

I lost the North Korean Beer bottle, which I was going to scan and present to you here, dear readers...I'll just have to be more careful next time.

LEMON OIL

HOW CAN ANYONE BE SO CRAZY?

This is how it happened (plot twists only believable in a movie)

A friend told me about an auction held by the U.S. Embassy disposing of USIS (a code name for the CIA) goods....so I turned up, never one to turn down a flea market opportunity. (notice how I used two parallel idioms in the same sentence?)

Then I was hooked. It was a sealed bid auction. Meaning that I had no idea whether a few dollars or a few hundred would win. I used a shotgun approach, put down small ten dollar bids on about 70 or 80 items, many identical.

Well, not exactly ten dollars, more like thirteen dollars and two cents. The thirteen was chosen because most westerners, whether they admit it or not, feel the number to be unlucky, and thus would be more likely to pick ten (the number of fingers) or twelve (the number of apostles).

The two cents was to account both for people who put a zero at the end of their bid without thinking, and two also would win over those who think about it, but put a 'one' at the end of their bid to win out over the others with identical bids.

Well, I was shocked and scared when they told me I'd won 24 bids. That's 24 lots of furniture, that is, sets of furniture.

So, 78 hours later, after furious email and sms texting activity on my part, I rounded up 4 of the 30 new teachers on our staff, most of whom were looking to acquire some furniture.

So I managed, somehow, to share the bounty (they paid the 13 bucks in most cases) and the labor (they definately got the short end of the stick on that account) and 7 weary hours later, we had moved THREE truckloads out of the embassy compound and into our offices and houses and whereever we could stuff them.

In fact, we ended up abandoning two desks, two end tables and a dresser to the dirty acid rain of the day. Sopped and furniture-sated, we finished off the day with kalbi and korean sake.

THE NEW SQUALOR

I hope to include this Laotian foot in my 'Feet Around the world series' someday - Just haven't decided whether it will be a flash animation or static pictures....

COMING AND GOING

This is the University Dormitory Parking lot behind my house, where apparently they use this improvised 'Denver boot' to immobilise an illegally parked car. I suppose what I like most about this is the sense of immediate, personal reaction; in my experience, people in America would rather call the tow truck and hide behind the anonymous (and ugly) facade of the tow truck company and the aggressive demeanor of the truck driver. But this, this is up close and personal; and most likely the driver of this car will learn their lesson without having to pay an arm and a leg.

although the smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture in the area ruins most long shots like these, the solitude of the fisherman with the pole on the mighty Mekong is truly something to see in person.

Here's another mystery fruit from the market in Luang Prabang; I didn't do my homework carefully and so I don't know what the heck this thing is. It may look like a fig but the seller seemed to be implying that it wasn't very sweet.

The richness- and strangeness - of the Jackfruit, which, like the martian Cacao fruit, springs straight out of the trunk without the help of branches...

The Courtyard of Wat Aham, Luang Prabang, just after sunrise and a fresh sweep by a squadron of monks. As usual, click the picture to see a larger version.

what could be 'greener' than having even the waste container made completely from renewable organic materials? It looks nice too, beside this lovely stretch of river in Luang Prabang

A monkboy picks his teeth on the stupendous curving riverbank of downtown Luang Prabang, one of the most exotic-sounding cities I've ever been to....though plenty overrun by other tourists seeking exotically named cities.

The picture that inspired the series 'Furniture Haiku' - one early sunday morning, undoubtedly after the drinking crowds had passed through the night before, I found this tableau of urban existence on a subway bench....It sort of ties in with the whole buddhist/tourist thing of stacking little rocks on top of eachother in impossibly high pagoda formations....

Another Furniture Haiku from Pra Athit Road in Banglampu, Bankok. Sorry I had to be so obvious as to paste in the blowup, but I didn't trust you to know that you could enlarge the picture by clicking on it (Flash would solve my problems, but then I'm not sure that 'Hello' can load it)

Maybe it's just me, but does anybody else see the resemblance to Imperialist (Fascist) Japan's flag? A professor got fired here last week for coming off as pro-Jap empire, but look at the damn chicken boxes! I'd be a little bit incensed if I was a korean flag-waver...

A food delivery poster/menu from a local restaurant. Proof that there's some kind of psychedelic drugs in Korea...I always thought those delivery guys were whacked, the way they zip around in heavy traffic with only one hand on the scooter handlegrips, while the other holds the heavy metal food container.

it's all melted now, but it's hard to imagine my backyard this beautiful ever again, even with the dog and chickens disappeared...

Have a look at this couple, the girl shyly smiling 'cause Jeezuz is in her heart....but take a closer look at how they market this Campus Christian group in these posters I found near my office elevator...

But when I look at how they acronymyze the word FISH in this poster I really wonder if it is a case of learner's English, or if they really do understand how to use using sex appeal to sell the product...

By Tanarug copyright 2004

Now I know what it was!

Now I know what was so special about yesterday! Not the sudden three inches of snow dumped in March, not the almost two hours I taught (should have been four, but I let them go early as per tradition on the first day). No, none of that.

What was so unique about my day is that I spent half the day going round to two clinics, the first for an examination, the second for a full blown treatment. Nothing too serious, just my back was acting up for the first time in a long time (I got lazy in Laos and didn't do my daily situps), so I went round to Hyungi's office near my neighborhood.

He really fixed me up good - he's one of the only three doctors in the world who have been able to deal with my strange lumbalgia - resulting from a full on car accident in San Francisco many years ago, I was struck by a car while I was on a bike and went high in the air (according to witnesses).

Anyways, he hooked me up to this electric vacuum pump apparatus, something that administers mild fibrillation while holding on to you with its suction cups. For the uninitiated it feels a lot like what being devoured by alien raptor worms must feel like. Or maybe, on a more earthly level, like jumping into a bathtup with a toaster under your arm, while simultaneously jogging through an automated carwash. It certainly challenges your use of metaphor....

I'm fine now. I just have to take it a little easy in prep for the big ski trip this weekend. I even passed up a drinking night with my two barroom buddies in Seoul (sorry guys)

dead things

Today the snow was a good omen. As it usually is where things concerning school are. I mean, how many of us prayed for a snow like this when we were tired of school? It really seemed like a gift from the heavens (literally) back then, and it seems no less now. Now Seoul is quieter, warmer, and more tranquil looking with its new snowjob.

Speaking of which, I nearly put a picture of my long-dead and unnamed cricket up. The reason is that I left the laptop at the office and am typing from the desktop at home. That is, the reason that I nearly put a picture of the cricket up....not the reason he is long dead and still unnamed. A linguist would point out all the ambiguities in the above sentences, but I'll just stop there. The cricket is already dead enough without beating him more with descriptive functional linguistics....

anyways...(another curious thing; I apparently am the ONLY native speaker of English to say 'anyways' instead of 'anyway')...I decided, instead of the aforementioned long dead and nomenclature challenged arthropod, to give you a nice cheery picture of a painting by a friend in Thailand, TANARUG (aka 'Bird') - who personally I consider one of the best artists I've ever known (are you reading this, Bird?)

Also don't even THINK about stealing his images for commercial use (this blog is still listener-supported) or I will hunt you down. However, if you'd like some of his artwork, I can hook you up with him (shameless plug - I told you bird, it's Picasso's legacy to the artworld)...

I better end this blog here before you figure out that I'm too tired from the stress of first-day-of-class hysteria to write decently.

and before I go, for those of you who like to chill, I'd like to recommend the music of Carla Bruni, in case you haven't discovered her yet. The sound of her breathy notes makes me believe that puppy love is possible even for old pokes like me....yes, I LOVE that woman's voice!

UPDATE! AS I Blogged the thing below, this was happening outside my window

.....And this

clearly child's play

First Day of School!

Just thought I'd put up this image, though I don't teach young children, it was what I enjoyed most about Laos, the kids play in the street, have a true, innocent childhood.

If you are patient, I'm currently cutting down all my trip pictures down to size, and instead of making you wait to see them one by one, I'm going to schlock them all into country folders that you can circulate through all at once or even put them on slideshow mode.

till then, kiddies!

Kelly

No, she doesn't have a female deer, or even some kind of alien quadropod, just a typical letter reversal charmingly common with kids

Blizzard of Birthday Cards from Home

Well, just when I thought my birthday was over, what do you know, but I get a heavy, substantial packet from my family in Oregon. It looks like quite an effort; every hand in the house, that wasn't incapacitated in some way or another, was press-ganged into this enormous transfer of paper, comics, miss-yous and what not from one side of the Pacific to the other.

What can I say? I must say I was touched. Although I must alert all of those of my gentle readers who abhor cruelty to animals, that one animal was harmed in the making of this blog.

That is, if the impassioned writings of small fry can be trusted. Bee-Bee (her real name is Beatrice, but she really has the energy of a BB just leaving the muzzle of an air-rifle) not only wrote to introduce her 'puppy', but big Brother Arlen left me with something of a 'Help, I'm a prisoner in a Fortune Cookie factory' sort of missive:

"Dear Kelly,
How are you? We miss you. Our puppy is big and bald. Mom scalped him. His hair is long all over.

except on his head.

Love,
Arlen

I took the liberty of amending the punctuation and spacing somewhat (the original is done in very rococco cursive, but I thought I'd spare you the extra image), but there you have it, a truly impassioned plea for help. I would alert the nearest PETA branch, but I fear that the dog is out of their reach, being, as it were, in a small town between two other smallish towns.

Somewhere in Oregon.

Here is my own personal Ground Zero, the smoking rubble of a building I once loved...not much different than any other smoking rubble, is it?

Elegy for a dear friend and child of mine

This weekend, I was able to finally say goodbye to a friend who had been ailing and lingering for some time. Not that death was imminent or even assured; but that for me, the original spirit had already left, and was just waiting for the body to follow.

Saturday night I was stumbling about the hood, blind drunk, with two Kiwi buddies, with the intention of dragging them into Macondo.

Those of you who know me know that this was the only tangible thing I've done with my entire life; after pouring all of my life force into it for many years, I was able to give this bar a foundation that would last it into the 21st century. It was one of only two businesses within a two block radius that survived the atomic-bomb like devastation of Korea's IMF crisis (known outside Korea as the Korean currency crisis.)

It was the only child of my marriage to a famous Korean. She sunk her money, I sunk my time and health into the project (imagine breathing all that smoke 24/7 - a bit like working at the smoking room in an airport.) It ended up, some might say, costing us our relationship - but that'll have to remain for a deeper analysis.

We turned the corner from the intersection, that same intersection I had passed so many, many times on the way to 'work', the only job I truly relished and was able to put in 89 hour workweeks without complaint - we turned the corner and were confronted by the scene you see above.

Rubble. A big hole where my baby had been. I thought all about the wall decorations (which had surely been taken down), the wall mural painted by a famous Korean artist, the wooden floor which had been built by Nick the Canadian and his girlfriend Angie (who looked up cheerfully while holding a jigsaw in one hand and squealed with girlish delight "It's just like sewing for guys!"

I thought about all the good times and how few, really how few bad times there had been; only one fight in all its years, a fight I didn't witness personally, but was apparently a jealous wife hair-pulling catfight kind of thing (the kind of fight guys watch in morbid horror/pleasure, not knowing if or when to interfere).

I thought about all the people who had passed through it's glass doors; diplomats and DDD workers (Dirty, Dangerous and Difficult - mostly Peruvians) , Korean pioneers and hipsters, and foreigners from nearly every nation (the ONLY Cuban passport holder in the entire country was our DJ). Some people had come to Macondo by word of mouth from as far as Buenos Aires and Madrid.

Macondo was the flagship of Salsa in the entire nation; a cradle of latin civilization that spawned as many direct descendants (Sabor Latino, Moonnight, among ) as it did imitators (too many, and too ignomious to mention all- but at last count there were 8 salsa bars in the Hong Dae neighborhood).

Macondo was more than a bar that sold drinks for its livelihood. It was nothing less than a Latin American embassy, disseminating the finer aspects of Latin American culture- and doing a better job than most of the actual embassies at doing that (the Mexican minister of culture used to borrow Mexican movies from us). The first Salsa lessons, the first Salsa dance contest, and the first Latin American cultural festival all were born there. (the festival was held in downtown Seoul, but was designed and carried out by Macondo people)

Macondo also represented the better part of diplomacy to many people; here was a place where Koreans of ALL AGES (so many asked at the door if we had an age-ist policy like the other bars) and outlooks could mingle with people of all nations, outlooks, ethnicity (everyone who crossed the door lintel became an honorary Latino for the night), where people could relax without pretension.

Macondo was truly a community; it went beyond the 'Cheers' concept - not only was it a bar where 'everyone knows your name' - but it was a bar where you would be sadly missed when you left the country, a place many people chose to have their birthday and farewell parties. It was a combination of place and time, a synthesis of all the right elements that I will be forever grateful for having been able to participate in.

Goodnight, dear friend. Go gently into the night, for you will be sorely missed by so many.

This French man may have looked like the crusty sitting next to me, but he was incredibly clean (a yogi since many years) and I'm sure that his dreadlocks were more than just fashion to him.

Hippie Boy gets his comeuppance

Whew!

I just finished a very long, very disgusting bus ride from Vientiane to Bangkok. I had intended to take the very excellent sleeper train from the border town of Nong Khai, but had been scared off the idea by a travel agent who told me that all the tickets were sold out, and that if I wanted, I could go standby and hope that someone would cancel.

I decided to go the sure and easy way. It turned out not to be so easy. First, I discovered that my seat assignment was the very last seat on the bus, in the back corner. If you know anything about vehicles, you know that the most comfortable place to sit is over the wheels, where the suspension is, or , failing that, in between the two suspension systems (in the middle). This is doubly true if you are riding a double decker, since it seems to have a greater travel (distance it rides up and down on bumps) than regular buses.

Well, there I was, stuck in the corner head-banging seat. Things got worse, as I discovered it didn't recline all the way, owing to a projecting rear light box behind it. But none of this mattered to me because of the Dreadlocked Frenchman who was sitting next to me.

He plomped down beside me and right away I felt something was wrong. A sickly-sour smell (why can't we have that smell? We've got sickly-sweet, after all!) , the unmistakeable pang of dead-skin and bio-detritus of the homeless, came wafting my way. At first I thought I was just making some sort of prejudiced judgement; after all, he looked like a dirty hippy (largely the effect of the dreads and the two-months-plus beard).

Now people who know my history know that I used to have quite long hair and a beard, and I used to go around saying exactly the kind of things people associated with hippies- in fact, my speech is still full of hippy-isms. People who know me even better know that I purposely studied the history of the sixties according to the pundits of the time (who were known as 'freaks', by the way; hippy was a pejorative coined by media hypists)

So I think that, compared to most people, I look quite favorably on what people call 'hippies', and I'm quite tolerant of any particular anti-social aberrations they may display. But maybe it's a product of my living in Asia, and having been 'asianized', that I just cannot tolerate bad body hygiene.

To me the two things are quite separate; you can oppose the 'man', you can fight for human rights, for freedom and equality, you can even do anti-social things like wear funky clothing and funky hair, but none of these things gets you out of a daily bath.

If you are familiar with Macrobiotics you might know something about George Osawa's curious aversion to soap, and the underlying belief that it harms health. Still, I kind of doubt that serious macrobioticists fail to wash - Osawa, was, after all, still Japanese, and they are a race of people serious about scrubbing the outer layers of dead skin off using mildly abrasive sponges. So macrobiotic soaplessness is also not an invitation to body odors if taken in the original spirit.

Then there is the curious poll that was taken of the hygiene habits of French people, which revealed that a good number of them only bathed two times or less per week - paralleling not just the previous English stereotype of them, but also explaining what someone had told me once: that French people believed it unhealthy to bathe overmuch.

So it didn't help that the guy next to me, Le Pig-Pen, was French. I tried hard to find ways in which he could be excused; perhaps the stench was coming from the unwashed seat of the bus; perhaps he had been in a hurry or had no time between buses; perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

But no; I could find no reasonable excuse for a failure to clean oneself; in a country where three dollars can get you a very, very nice room with a bathroom inside, where even where you share a bath with other guests, no one, owner included, minds you washing your clothing and hanging it on the family clothing line; to have your laundry done for you costs about fifty cents a kilo in Laos.

So this was a kind of revelation for me; finally I could understand why so many people around the world seemed so judgemental of hippies. They smell bad; or at least some of them do, as I now have the proof. Worse, they have the money and the means to not smell bad, but they do so anyways.

Interestingly enough, the Scot in the seat in front of me began talking about this, and apparently (possibly in all of Britain, but who knows?) the Scots distinguish between clean hippies (just 'hippy') and dirty ones (known as crusties). Nice word. Or then again, perhaps not, probably too graphic.

Rice Cakes drying in the sun

More Moral Musings from the Heart of Darkness

Feeling a bit sick to my stomach today. I'm taking antibiotics, so I'm not worried about any pathogens, unless they're viral. And you might think that I'm queasy because I just bought a bunch of (uncooked) bee and ant larvae (eggs), but that's not it, either.

I'm feeling a bit wonky because of what I saw for sale in the market. Besides the usual bits of flesh, blood, and guts for sale by smiling, wholesome-looking women, there were also some
things that tested my ability to see the world in shades instead of black and white.

There was a whole line of what appeared to be chipmunks, or voles of some sort. There was a large, and very dead, canopy-dwelling bird with a large beak. There, next to yet another chunk of in-the-comb bee-larvae, was what appeared to be a skinned and cooked bat. (that one in particular turned my stomach, because the lady offered me some bee larvae, and I ate it)

I'm sorry that I don't have any pictures for you, but I just felt it was a bit...invasive of me to take them. Taking a picture might constitute a judgement on these people - and though you might argue that the taking of (possibly rare) canopy birds for commercial purposes is 'black-and-white' wrong - neither you nor I have any idea of the circumstances surrounding this act.

Of course, it is easier for us to be certain about wrongdoings in our own culture - people like former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay probably deserve all of the ire and malfamy heaped upon them - for they have not only acted to the detriment of society for their own enrichment, but to them were given the keys to the kingdom - the benefit of a good childhood, good education, and all the opportunities that those things entail.

But of these people, can we honestly say that they had other opportunities to make 'an honest living'? What if they are simply doing what they and their ancestors have been doing for millenia? Is it their concern if the pressures upon the ecosystem brought about by encroachment of urban centers and the subsequent industrialization are as much to blame for the lessening of the bird population as they are? After all, it is we, the urban dwellers, who have brought an end to their way of life.

Buddha in the cave...this one cost 50 cents admission....and nearly two dollars in Toll Taxes on bamboo bridges!

Charity begins at home...and finishes on the road

I have the oddest notions about beggars. Today we were comparing Pnom Penh with Vientiane, and besides a lot of involved history, what really distinguishes these two Indochinese capitals are the beggars.

Pnom Penh actually has a noticeable number of victims of land mines. Or at least that's what springs to mind, since mines are so famous, and then you see someone without a limb- your mind makes the connection. Of course, not all of them are beggars, but Pnom Penh does seem to have many more people missing limbs.

The other thing, slightly more annoying, is that some beggars in Pnom Penh will walk up to you and ask for a dollar (one person actually asked for ten). The currency of the country is not dollars, and the meaning of being asked for dollars is that this particular person has been taught by experience that foreigners have a guilt complex that can be harvested by an open hand and the word 'dollar'...

Of course this is really out of proportion; these people with the guilt complex and the deep pocket are the NGO and UN mid and upper level executives, who make in excess of 100,000 per year, with a mansion and a chauffered car provided free. In other words, they are suddenly perceived by the people they have come to 'help' as being a kind of noble class, since they are in reality among the top 1% of the country who have 90% of the income.

Some of them realize this gap and perhaps grasp the hypocrisy of it all, and their pocket opens each time they see someone who reminds them of it. Not so the grubby backpacking tribe, whose money was made by washing dishes in Sidney or teaching English in China, and who extended that money by bargaining, haggling, and doublechecking menu overcharging all along the way to Pnom Penh.

Their pockets do not open as easily; nor do the pockets of well heeled travelers - since they tend to look harder at the person to see whether or not they might actually be capable of working instead of begging. This latter group is more likely to deny a donation to a beggar on economic or so-called 'moral' principles than either of the other two groups.

Vientiane apparently hasn't got as many of these NGO and UN types running around, though they certainly do have a presence. Perhaps they do have as many people on the ground here, but their effect is ameliorated by larger numbers of the other two types mentioned above (don't forget that some 'normal' people are still afraid of the land mine/political coup situation in Cambodia)

So I found it a little strange the other day when this Lao lady, mid-thirties, asked for money for food. She was in fact, the neatest dresser I had seen in the country, sporting very artistic tennis shoes, matching dress, makeup, etc. She had a brand new expensive looking backpack, and a 'fashion' bag full to the top with objects; all I could see was a silver teapot poking out of it.

She more resembled a mugged yuppie than an itinerant beggar; or perhaps an educated person; who as a result of a very recent lover's quarrel, had been thrust out upon the street with a few of her belongings.

I finally decided that she was suffering some sort of mental problems. Even if she was a 'scammer', this would not be an intelligent way to go about it, and by all appearances, she certainly had some intelligence.

Does this mean she didn't deserve some help? Certainly this was not the case, but how to help people like this? This appears to be our dilemma in the west, since so many more of our beggars fit into this category than beggars you might see in the third world.

It certainly leaves you wondering about the two situations relative to each other; though people confronted by beggars in third world countries feel guiltier - are they really any more guilty than those in advanced countries who rationalize away helping the mentally ill, who the government has cast out upon the streets and the tender mercies of the ignorant public?

Missing Tally from the last Tsunami

Jumping on the Tsunami Bandwagon

It appears the Tsunami is back, sooner than we expected. I don't know if you've seen the images of the waves buffeting the shores of Sumatra, but I found it fascinating that Lao people, who have no coastline to speak of, though most of them live within flood distance of the Mekong river, were so captivated by the images of the marauding sea.

Stranger still is the above image taken from the 'Tsunami Victims' wall at the end of Khao San road in Bangkok. The tally lists just three South Koreans as missing; and stranger still is that there was actually a North Korean taken by the tide as well....

One wonders what this poor communist straggler was doing there - was this person with the South Koreans? Or possibly spying on them? Or just having a vacation like all the thousands of people from decadent capitalist nations. Surely the winter in North Korea is something worth escaping from for a little respite on the southern beaches of Thailand.

One more level of weirdness removed is that Indonesia falls into the 'one person missing in Thailand' column. How odd that a neighboring country only had one of its citizens in the path of the wave....of course there might have been hundreds of other Indonesians who did not go missing, and the same could be said for North Koreans...but since Koreans of any flag are rarely, if ever, alone, then what of the other, non-perished Koreans? How many were they in total?...

A little Huck Finn on the River Kading

A bit of Ranting Down South in Laos

February 12th;

An exciting couple of days jaunt into the 'neck' of Laos with an intrepid Dutch girl. This is the second time I have had a female platonic travel companion (fptc), and both of them were Dutch, and both of them were named Marion. The first Marion went down the exotic Usumacinta river with me in Guatemala/Mexico (the river forms the bortder) so many years ago, and it is not a little bit weird that this Marion also had planned a river trip; the feeling of repeating myself was too eerie; Marion 2 even looked like Marion 1.

The river's name this time was the Nam Kading, and the launch point, appropriately enough, was a village called Pak Kading. Most of the reason I wanted to go with Marion is that she said the river was pristine, had been cited by the lonely planet as a potential spot for adventure travel, and because I was rather festering in Vientiane.

Not exactly festering...but I had acheived a queer balance of travel without moving; after my arrival in the capital, I didn't feel like going anywhere else. Very similar to my thing with Yangon, I seem to have this predilection to want to 'decompress' for the longest time after arrival in a country, and to slowly interpret that country in terms of its capital city.

So when I had the chance to join her on this trip, it was largely a chance to get some travel momentum. After being in Vientane only four days, I already owned a hammock and ropes (plus the valuable real estate in the hotel to hang it in, since my room fronted a balcony), a kilogram glass whiskey bottle of honey, assorted snacks and a small DVD collection (they apparently are coming from China directly, and are 30% cheaper than Bangkok)...in short, I had set up shop and started to accumulate the detritus of budget travel....

Of course it is true I'm still convalescing from the hard road of Burma and the subsequent devastation of the winter camp, where I was laid low with fever...but it just seemed logical that I should make an attempt to get off my keester and see two or three cities of this country.
It was a great trip. I left Marion yesterday in Tha Kaek, a rather annoying town at the junction of the Mekong and a chain of limestone karst formations (read 'hills') jutting out of the plain. I say annoying because we stayed in this lovely guesthouse (four dollars for a single) with a garden and loads of beautiful teak furniture, which turned out to be still miles from the Mekhong, and the center of town.

Tha Kaek was suffering from Urban Sprawl, despite not really having enough population to call it a Big City. The street in front of the guesthouse was lined with businesses, but behind those buildings were just jungle, farmland, crisscrossed with canals and chicken coops.

The consequence of this is that what appeared to be actual urban space was not; rather it was frontage designed for motorcycle traffic that would later become car traffic. None of the shops were what you would call typical urban shops like restaurants or clothing or department stores; they were mostly selling furniture or metal welded roofs or snacks.

There was no sidewalk, and no reason to build one either, since there was no pedestrian traffic. How much this reminded me of similar places in American cities, places that make a pedestrian feel like an alien creature, an unwelcome blemish on the face of a car-crazed culture!

I also noticed that there seemed to be a trend in making buildings. The traditional Lao, indeed, indochinese way of making a house is building a house on high stilts, so that instead of having a first floor to a two story house, one just has freely circulating air. This design assures natural cooling for the house, as well as flood protection.

The trend in Tha Khaek was towards one of energy dependence; instead of building a light, airy construction, they were now building concrete block monstrosities, that, since they now lacked a natural cooling mechanism, were dependent on several side mounted air conditioning units. In order to make the air conditioning more effective, then, it is necessary to seal the house up, participating in a sort of airless vicious cycle.

The design of western homes and the use of vapor barriers in insulation has often been cited as a major design weakness and potential health risk of western construction. What will it mean here, in this tropical area, where mold, mildew will have a perfect, anaerobic environment in which to flourish?

How much worse, then, than this dependence on air conditioning, which appears to be slowly and steadily making its appearance in this country that never knew it (Lao have used caves and hilltops for the occasional breath of cool air).

Air conditioning is not only shocking to the body, since it causes exposure to temperature extremes, and stifles the body's natural ability to cool off, but it is also extremely anti-egalitarian, since the air conditioning unit produces hot air outside the house, where it is assumed into the environment, thus making a hot day hotter for those unpriveleged persons not inside of the house (pedestrians passing by, for example)

I know, I know, it sounds a bit hard-ass of me to deny everyone the right to have air conditioning. But this wilful and wanton tendency towards energy dependence is to me just as disturbing as the warmongering that it entails later (the governments will all end up fighting over sources of energy or water in the future).

It seems appropriate to end this tirade on a slightly hypocritical note. I'm typing this story on a laptop, Bus-bound and hurtling back north towards Vientiane with only the light of a crescent moon for company. The batteries heat up quite a bit during use, and I'm finally cooked to the point where I can write no more.

Gentle Reader, I leave you to imagine the crescent moon and the barely perceptible friendliness of its light.

A bee's eye view...

A Bee's Eye View

Foggy Sunrise over Vientiane...I do hope you've had your breakfast before you read this...

Breakfasting on the oddest of substances, bee larvae in the comb. I can't explain the complicated mechanism whereby I somehow fooled myself into eating it the first time (there was another traveler nearby, so perhaps the 'dare' element was the active ingredient)

The taste is easier to describe: it is a milky liquid, tinged with salt, which I believe the Lao add for flavor in the form of soya sauce. The sensation of the milk flooding your mouth is not unpleasant, however it is so difficult to keep your mind from focusing on the source of that milk; the fact that it comes from inside of the hex cells of the bee is enough to make most people gag.

But once you have eaten your first 'larvaecomb', the hardest part is over - then technique begins to take over...you can tear each litle cell off of the whole bit by bit, it becomes the sort of food you can pick at while making conversation with a friend (the perfect party food)-and before you know it, you are tearing off the very last little honeycomb cell.

This is not the only strange and exotic food I encountered in the marketplace; I also found people eating ant eggs mixed with other food. As you might suspect, ant eggs look like little grains of rice, only slightly more rubbery and juicy...I tried a few of them, but wasn't able to detect a taste on such a small quantity.

From the street behind the temple....no pictures till tomorrow

For those of you that know Khao San Road in Bangkok, I'm on a little back alley behind the temple, at one of the 1 baht/minute internet glass-enclosures. I've just bought an air-con sleeper berth to Nong Khai on Sunday - this is the border town for Laos - at a bargain of less than 20 dollars. I've been warned not to take the word 'air con' lightly - I'll need a good sweater on top of the blanket they issue, just to stay warm enough to sleep.

So, another crazy circus-like Saturday night is mine to spend in the Khao San Hippie Emporium (well, most real hippies I met have been avoiding this place since the late eighties - preferring to sleep out of town, like Ayuttaya and places like that)- it should prove to be a nice counterpoint to the insanity of Seoul nightlife.

Khao San, in fact is quite a phenomenon, so much so, that originally it went from being a place that 'decent' Thai people would avoid like the plague (unless they needed to make money, which of course is always a good thing here) to a three-ring freak show that draws their daughters in by the droves, hoping to meet a handsome blond Dane, or a wild and crazy Italian, or a mild-mannered and polite/presentable Canadian or American...Perfectly 'decent' Thai girls came to see this place as a great place to travel the world without ever leaving home.

After all, nothing was going on here morally that hadn't been going on for hundreds of years elsewhere in Thailand - but this one at least had a flair, a twist of the exotic and different.

Indeed, it is hard to ascribe any nationality to this place. Khao San will someday probably be seen by scientists as the best proof of some of the more objectionable aspects of String Theory. I'm referring to the eleven dimensions proposed by the theory. Khao San is definately in one of those eleven dimensions; which one, nobody can be sure of - but it definately is not in our current dimension.

I'll try to update more later, either with pics from Bangkok or from the last Burma trip.

happy bird day to me!

DONT EVEN THINK OF ASKING HOW MANY!

Hello dear readers....we interrupt the Burma monotribe to bring you a moment of sheer ego stroking. Well, almost. Strangely I got to celebrate my birthday twice with two different sets of cakes and candles. The first time it was really embarrassing, though, I had tagged along with my younger friend Regan the Kiwi (see ma, I do like 'Regan') to one of his young guys parties, and his friend Sunhi was having a birthday party. As it turned out, they had two cakes, someone had accidentally brought an extra,and he was determined to embarrass me in public.

On the way to the party, I stopped off at Carne Station (ugh.) This is some kind of wallowing trough that represents the worth of both American and Korean cultures. It's a gigantic, all-you-can-eat 'upmarket' buffet whose main attractive feature is the no-name whiskey and well drinks section. Since I'm on antibiotics, that lost most of its appeal; the rest of the food, served in the most unappealing way possible, just didn't seem to measure up to the first time I went there years ago.

Smuggling some hot berry pies out of the restaurant in my coat to Regan and his 'Young Guy' friends, I met them at the local train station and we proceeded to the party only a block away. On the way, we agreed that my age would be 35, since the real number (how dare you for asking!) would be a little bit high for the median age of the party. 35 would still make me the oldest one there, not counting the girls parents.

I can't believe we pulled it off - of course, people had already been drinking for hours by the time we trotted out the lie - and Regan, in a last attempt to make me blush, changed the number to 34, so I adamantly changed it back to 35.

The thing about age in this country is that it is usually one of the first questions Koreans ask. They can't even conjugate their verb properly until they know if they are lower or higher than you in terms of age rank. This age rank thing has got to be one of the most objectionable things Western people find with Confucian culture.

As an example, when there is a fender bender, the two drivers will jump out of their cars and begin accusing each other (this is another problem, admission of guilt is hard to obtain) of being at fault. The language might start dropping in politeness as it would anywhere in the world, and at this point, the older driver might say something like this: How DARE you talk to me that way! I'm OLDER than you..." as if this somehow constituted the logical conclusion to the argument (it doesn't, not even in Korea, because the car remains scratched and has to be paid for - but it sometimes quells further verbal discussion)

This is an ugly side of age rank. There are a lot of good sides as well, such as a reserved elderly seating section on the subway cars (that, in contrast to the west, is never occupied by the young and un-handicapped) and often you will see younger people give up their seat on a crowded bus for an older person. But for me it remains a nightmare; every time I meet someone new, they can't resist asking the question.

Many times I break down and just tell them; and then watch as they grow cold and distantly polite with me, whereas minutes ago we had struck up a warm and interesting conversation. It's a bit like telling people you are HIV positive or something; they're deferential, but a little distant since they know you will die before they do....Ok , maybe that's not the best analogy, but it definately resembles some sort of social pariah status....

This is how I came to have an 'ageist' complex...surrounded by an ageist culture, I don't want to tell anybody anything about my personal details for fear of being labeled, categorized, boxed, and avoided.

But still, you have to admit, two birthdays....now that's a real ego stroking.

"Gold Roast keeps the kinks out of my neck coils- it will yours too!" (click to enlarge)

Can Something Be Exotic without being a little Bizzare?

For me the short answer is no. Finding a little something of the quirky, unexpected, sometimes darker nature of the human soul is what the meaning of adventure entails. Greeting me for my first time in this country I had heard so little about was sights like the one above: Getting your ya-yas , as they used to say in the eighties, with things like tribal lady models on coffee ads (instead of sex symbols) and beer with one-celled blue green algae as an additive.

I don't know what you, dear reader, know about spirulina (sorry, no link), but for me it has always been associated with the excesses of vegetarianism. A former vegetarian myself, and certainly not against any but the more extreme forms like 'breatharianism' and stuff *, I was quite enthused when I discovered that it was loaded with protein (something like three to four times more than beef, depending on the cut)

But when I looked at it, it was singularly unappealing. It was, in short, a blue-green powder, the color that only a dedicated Dadaist would color food to make people freak out. Furthermore, it smelled like algae (because it is) and tasted like algae (I grew up on a lake, which filled our mouths, noses and ears with algae).

So, naturally, you can't just hold your nose and swallow the two spoonfuls of blue powder per day just because it contains more protein than a twelve ounce steak.....smart vegetarians blend it in with yoghurt, bananas, sugar, ice cream, anything that blenders well. So naturally I was surprised and pleased and....oh yeah, I almost forgot the passive verb form of 'exotic', but English doesn't have that one, when I saw that these clever Burmese were taking their protein orally - with a kick. Of course you'd probably need to drink a half a case of these things to get the necessary quantity of Spirulina, so....

Imagine, then, my disappointment when I 'Googled' the word combination just now and discovered that Qingdao is also marketing this kind of beer---and probably Budweiser will be next. ("Would you like a Budalina?") Oh well, so much for the exotic factor. Anyways, it seems hard to imagine a country in the world with such a sight as these two billboards present the seer with.

I was tickled pink as our strange taxi (didn't have any taxi markings, but the man had some kind of laminated permission to drive people around for money on the dash, and we had to walk way away from the airport to get into this contraption - My guess is that he didn't want to pay kickbacks to the airport officials), as our strange taxi tooled around the choking dirty streets of this newfound exotic place I had wanted to come to for seventeen years.

that's all for now, folks...please stay tuned, I've got over 700 mb of jpegs on Burma...including a short propoganda film filmed in nuttyvision!

*speaking of extremism, I was shocked to discover that spirulina actually represents part of the evolution of plants to mammals - strictly speaking it is not a plant, because it lacks stiff cellulose cell walls, though it has a poorly organized nucleus (I'm paraphrasing here, forgive me cellular biologists) - but, and especially if you were an extremist, you could make the case that this living thing is not plant life and should thus not be eaten by serious vegetarians. What would you call these kind of people? Why, cellulitists of course. Don't blame me that the spelling is so close to cellulitis.

Yangon airport

Coming into the Country

Landing at Yangon airport, I suddenly had all the feeling of travel in an exotic place, a feeling that had gotten lost in my decades-long self exile from the land of my birth. I had tried to come here in 1987, but things then were so complicated that it just didn't work (another place that happened that way was the Hunza valley of Pakistan, twice I have tried to go there and have had to turn back), and secretly I vowed to come back when circumstances were better.

Well, 17 years on, the Lonely planet has resumed publishing about Burma, people are starting to travel there, and little by little Yet Another Boycott Which Didn't Work (to which we must add, unfortunately, Cuba and North Korea) will work its way into the shadowy pages of non-history. I decided this past Christmas that I finally had to kill my exotic Burma fantasy; why in the time I had waited, the country had even changed names, there had been demonstrations and a bloody Tianenmen-style repression, and Burma continued to grow slowly through the helping hand of China and India.

There was a curious mixture of fear and curiousity as I walked from the plane (walked? when was the last time anybody did that on the tarmac?) to the exotic looking terminal (see picture above). Well, maybe I've already used up my quota on that word, exotic. And perhaps the terminal doesn't deserve it because it looks sort of like a cheezy outlying temple complex building in Thailand. Burma shows its closeness to Thailand, not only geographically, but religiously and through decorations like this.

But still, even Don Muang Airport in Bangkok was just another airport, generic terminal bays, taxi ranks, all that jazz. But here was this - this monstrosity, and whether you cared for that kind of SE Asian gaudy baroque or not, for better or worse this place was different and visibly so from the outset.

The taxi ranks were also different, as we (I had hooked up with an intriguing Dutch couple by this point) found ourselves walking past the parking lot and down a dirt road with this taxi driver, who for some mysterious reason (not mysterious, it's always about money) parked half a mile away...in fact, as I looked around, after two minutes, it was easy to forget we were even at the airport - here were houses, trees, streets....no sound of jets....weird kind of space-time warp.

I better call it a night. We'll delve into the seamy underside and the gleamy overside of Yangon next.....

home cyclotron

So I bought a little Cyclotron

OK, so you're disappointed, because you thought you were going to see a lot of pictures of Burma right away....well, they're coming, but I want to squeeze a story out of them if you don't mind.

In the meantime, I'd like to relate my latest adventure. Shopping in Asia has always been an adventure. Often the worst part of the adventure is finding out that you can't buy something, something you took for granted, something you thought might be universal. China is the biggest shock for shoppers, especially when they discover that most of the things, especially nice things, that are made in China are simply not for sale in that country.

Korea has always been that way, I remember years ago trying to hobble together the ingredients for a simple hamburger to put on the menu at my bar: the meat, bun, pickles, lettuce, and tomato all came from different stores or markets in completely different parts of the city - so I travelled probably about 50 miles to pick them all up. Exhausting.

Which is why, when I saw a salad spinner for sale here, I regretted not buying it on the spot. Actually I didn't have money on me at the time, but I could have returned the next day to snap up the only model in the store. As it turns out, when I finally got back to the store, it was gone. Not the spinner, but the whole store. wham.

About two months later I found another store that also had one, just one model for sale. But I didn't like this one as much as the previous one, because it was too big. My house is only a 10 by 10 square little box of a studio, so I have to have Japanese-y ways of conserving space. And this thing was BIG, maybe almost double the size of the one from the out-of-business place.

So I passed it up, thinking, maybe if I made a concerted effort, I'd be able to scare up a more decent one. I couldn't.

When I went back to the store the other day, practically hopping from the bitter cold, it was still there. Well, almost. The shop lady and I had to hunt it down, she took my conviction as evidence that such a thing existed and that I would buy it, so she started pulling things off the shelf and digging to the back. There it was, gleaming aquamarine, my very own spinner.

Now I could get down to the serious business of making salads (Korea is one of the best places in the world to buy exotic salad fixings, like dandelion and chicory and the like). Not that I couldn't eat salad without a salad spinner; it's just that since I'm eating mostly water anyways, I'd rather have most of the water on the inside of the leaf than on the outside...call it an affectation of mine.

The only problem is, when I got this monster home, I realized just how damn big the thing is. I mean, it's only marginally smaller than the new CERN cyclotron in Switzerland which will smash protons in an attempt to detect smaller subnuclear particles. I wondered if my new device would get up to the same speeds, and if so, what the accentuated g-forces would do to my poor parsley...

Somehow, I wondered what the Koreans had been thinking when they designed, cast and molded such a device....was it intended as a backup in case your washing machine's motor gave up and you needed to spin most of the water out of your clothes? In America it would most certainly come with a large red Dumb People Beware Warning Sticker: something like this:

"WARNING! This device acheives high molecular velocities! Do NOT attempt to dry small children or pets by putting them inside the spinner bowl. Do NOT stick fingers or sharp pointy things inside device while operating."

Still, it's a lot of fun operating it, even if I'm secretly afraid the crank will get out of hand and break my arm or something.

Thanks for reading...the next post I'll attempt to deconstruct Burma.

Bangkok, night before leaving to Burma...some kid on the street, who thinks he is an LA gangsta, makes the sign for 'LA' (I think)